To Bomb a Hospital

Life has been rough lately, things pile up on every front. I had written most of this article, and then let it fall by the wayside since so much time had gone by. And then yesterday, Israel bombed another hospital. So, I decided to crank out the last couple paragraphs, and send it off.

Please, take care of each other.

To Bomb a Hospital

Israel demands the mass evacuation of entire cities in Gaza (WAR CRIME).

Israel demands the evacuation of 20 hospitals in northern Gaza (WAR CRIME), threatening to target them with military strikes (WAR CRIME).

A major explosion kills 300-500 people at one of these hospitals Israel had been threatening to bomb, the al Ahli Arab hospital (WAR CRIME).

Minutes later, an aide to Netanyahu posted on social media “Israeli Air Force struck a Hamas terrorist base inside a hospital in Gaza,” and then quickly deleted it, covering up evidence of the bombing (WAR CRIME).

The Israeli military’s official social media accounts proceed to admit to the bombing and make jokes about it, laughing about killing babies and making it clear that in their view and in their rules of engagement, all Palestinians are terrorists (WAR CRIME).

The same day, Israel bombed a school inside a refugee camp in Gaza (WAR CRIME).

The Israeli government then begins to deny what they had already promised they would do, and what they already admitted to. They also doctored audio which they claimed was Hamas members admitting they had been the ones to bomb the hospital (WAR CRIME).

Subsequently, most mainstream English-language media reported Israeli claims without evaluating any evidence, they refused to mention that Israel had already threatened to bomb that hospital and multiple others, they had in fact already hit that very hospital with multiple rounds, and within minutes of bombing it again, killing hundreds of people, they admitted to it on social media. After they deleted that post and various Israeli politicians started spreading the lie that the Palestinians were somehow responsible, the Israeli military began joking about how they had bombed the hospital on their feed. All the media had to do was to share a screenshot. Not only did they fail to do that, they refused to mention any of the many well documented war crimes Israel has already carried out, or their history of systematically carrying out war crimes and crimes against humanity in their war against Palestinians and against neighboring Arab countries.

All of these, technically, are war crimes, including the media’s involvement. Media can be complicit in war crimes if they create a climate that makes the atrocities likely to happen and if they help the material authors get away with it by participating in a cover up. One of the people executed in the Nuremberg Trials for crimes against humanity was Julius Streicher, a Nazi publisher who promoted the virulent antisemitism and anticommunism that made the Holocausts possible.

If we applied these standards fairly, Rob Picheta (CNN), Alexander Ward and Matt Berg (Politico), and Margherita Stancati (Wall Street Journal), to name just a few examples, would be executed for supporting crimes against humanity, or—given the current trends in what’s considered justice—locked in a cage for several decades. These journalists spread reports that supposedly showed the Israelis were innocent, after these reports had already been discredited or revealed to be deliberate fabrications; all of them presented Israeli and US intelligence assessments as fact-based and beyond question (many people have already forgotten how the media distributed reports that had already been debunked to help justify Bush II’s invasion of Iraq, leading to the deaths of over a million people: may we remember, at the very least, that New York Times journalist Judith Miller is one of the most deserving candidates for the Julius Streicher award for her direct role in preparing mass murder, as is her executive editor at the time, Howell Raines).

Rob Picheta, CNN news producer. Some people start so young making bank off of mass murder…